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Introduction › How Device Support Works

How Device Support Works

Data Aggregator supports a vendor device using metric families and vendor certifications. Working together, these components determine how Data Aggregator collects configuration and operational metrics for a device. Understanding how device support works in Data Aggregator helps you determine whether your devices are properly supported in Data Aggregator. If they are not, understanding this process can help you adjust your settings to get the results you need.

Note: If needed, you can customize a metric family, vendor certification, or both to add support for a vendor device.

Data Aggregator supports devices using the following configuration features:

  1. Discovery Profile—Determines which items in your environment Data Aggregator discovers, typically based on a range of IP addresses. The discovery process identifies the "type" for each item it finds.
  2. Device Collections—Organizes your inventory into groups of related items. Based on the item type and IP address, items are automatically added to a device collection.
  3. Monitoring Profile—Controls the polling rate for a device collection and determines which metric families to poll. Monitoring profiles can poll one or more metric families.

    Note: To ensure that your system is not overloaded with polling traffic, use monitoring profiles to adjust the polling rate for different sets of metrics.

  4. Metric Family—Controls which metrics are gathered for a monitoring profile. Metric families are associated with one or more vendor certifications, which are listed in priority order.

    Note: Reuse metric families in your monitoring profiles to help ensure consistent data reporting.

  5. Vendor Certification—Maps attributes from a vendor MIB to the metrics in a metric family. Also determines how metrics that are collected from an item are formatted for use in the CA Performance Center UI and reports. Metrics that are provided for an item can vary, depending on the item vendor . Mapping these values ensures that the metric values are reported consistently, regardless of the vendor. Multiple vendor certifications can be associated with a single metric family. In such cases, Data Aggregator maps metric values using a ranked list of vendor certifications. Data Aggregator calculates a metric value using the highest-priority vendor certification that matches the polled item.

    Note: MIBs, such as SNMP MIBs, can be imported into the system and compiled as part of building a vendor certification.

Example: Support for a Router Device

When running your discovery profile, Data Aggregator finds and identifies an item as a router. The router managed item is automatically added to the All Routers device collection. This device collection is associated with the Routers monitoring profile, which uses the CPU and Memory metric families to discover the CPU and Memory components on the device. These metric families also determine the vendor certification to use when calculating the metric values for these components. Based on this monitoring profile, Data Aggregator polls your router every 5 minutes for the metric data in these metric families. For example, the CPU metric family includes CPU idle utilization, CPU system utilization, and CPU nice utilization. Finally, the vendor certifications that are associated with a metric family determine how to calculate and format the raw metric data consistently. Data Aggregator stores the collected metric data for your router, which CA Performance Center uses in the UI and reports.